Abstract

In the emerging eScience environment, repositories of papers, datasets, software, etc., should be the foundation of a global and natively-digital scholarly communications system. The current infrastructure falls far short of this goal. Cross-repository interoperability must be augmented to support the many workflows and value-chains involved in scholarly communication. This will not be achieved through the promotion of single repository architecture or content representation, but instead requires an interoperability framework to connect the many heterogeneous systems that will exist.

We present a simple data model and service architecture that augments repository interoperability to enable scholarly value-chains to be implemented. We describe an experiment that demonstrates how the proposed infrastructure can be deployed to implement the workflow involved in the creation of an overlay journal over several different repository systems (Fedora, aDORe, DSpace and arXiv).

Isaac Newton to Robert Hooke in a letter dated 5th February 1676. Written as “If have seen further it is by standing on ye sholders[sic] of Giants.”. Quote reproduced in Never at Rest: A Biography of Isaac Newton, Richard S. Westfall, Cambridge, 1980, p 274. Amusingly, many forms of this phrase are (mis)attributed to Newton. The phrase draws on the much older metaphor of “dwarfs standing on the shoulders of giants” and hence being able to see further by virtue of their vantage point rather than stature